No Lessons Learned…Again

When it comes to food I really have only one huge rule. Don’t eat peanuts. It’s a very basic rule. Don’t eat peanuts or you will die. I have been allergic to peanuts, cashews, macadamias, and maybe a few others, all my life. Even the smell has an effect on me. It seems however I need to be reminded every once in a while to check the label, or do the sniff test BEFORE I put the food in my mouth. I remembered this little fact when the delicious little chocolate was halfway down my throat, and that really uncomfortable feeling started growing stronger and stronger. This is when I get so frustrated with myself. Still chewing on the chocolate, and with the allergic reaction building in mouth and throat, I hesitated to spit it out. It was still delicious. That was my thought. Yummy. My second thought finally arrived and I spit the treat out and called my hubby to stay on the line with me while I rinsed my mouth out, brushed my teeth, and dusted off my epi-pen just in case. Hubby came rushing home from work, and my mother in law shortly before hubby to make sure I was okay. I still felt horrible for the rest of the day. You’d think I would learn my lesson that I shouldn’t steal my baby basset’s candy, and to check to see if what I am eating has peanuts. You would think, huh? Yaaa…. I went back into their bags a few hours later looking for more treats. I love chocolate.

For fans of John Connolly, Nevada Barr, and dogs of all shape and size, the first novel in the new Flint K-9 Search and Rescue Mysteries, from the author of the USA Today-bestselling Erin Solomon Mysteries.

Meet Jamie Flint — a no-nonsense veteran K-9 trainer and handler with a ‘gift’ she’d be happy to return: like her dogs, Jamie can sense things the rest of the world is blind to.

When teenage sisters go missing in the mysterious ‘Bennington Triangle’ of Vermont, an area renowned for its disappearances and strange occurrences over the past hundred years, FBI agent Jack Juarez brings Jamie and her dog Phantom in to assist with the search. When Jack learns that the case shares haunting similarities with the murders of the missing girls’ aunts ten years before, he realizes they’re dealing with much more than two girls who simply wandered off the beaten path. And when a young girl appears in the shadows, visible to Jamie alone, it becomes clear that something is desperately wrong here.

After losing his job, girlfriend, and life as he knew it all within the span of two short months in early 2013, Tom Edwards decided it was time to live out his lifelong dream and travel the world. After turning to his guitar for income and selling most of his worldly possessions, he set out — along with two friends — with big dreams and grandeur visions of adventures.

Shortly thereafter when the realization was made that the group had nowhere near enough money to support their journey, they found themselves sleeping under bridges, hitchhiking with drug dealers, befriending prostitutes, living as homeless persons, hopping trains, and finding all kinds of other trouble to get into. Then on top of everything else, when tensions arise between the three companions, Edwards wonders if he’ll be forced to go on alone.

Follow the hilarious tale of travel-gone-wrong, debauchery, and adventure in Planes, Trains, and Broken Strings, as a broke indie-musician tries to find his place in the world with the help of a cast of colorful characters he meets along the way.

Jon Porter works with his ex-wife and ex-best friend in the sleepy vacation town of Stone Lake. He toils to keep their construction company afloat while the exes in his life enjoy their honeymoon.

Jon meets Morgan when a flock of turkeys and a curvy mountain road aligns with one-in-a-million timing. Despite their attraction, her engagement, and the ire of her family, the pair embarks on a platonic friendship. As their relationship strengthens, they share secrets, but Morgan holds her most important secret tight to her chest, where it beats like a ticking time bomb.

Forty years before the names Snowden and Manning entered the world’s cultural lexicon, Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee became America’s youngest convicted spies — condemned to federal prison in 1977 for their roles in one of the most highly publicized espionage cases in Cold War history.

Yet the story of their crime, as told in the book and movie THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN, was only the beginning.

Locked away in some of the country’s most violent and inhospitable prisons, Boyce and Lee survived repeated attempts on their lives and years of solitary confinement before a young and idealistic paralegal, Cait Mills, attempted to put them on the path to freedom. Diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, Mills’ determination to continue her work while battling the illness ultimately changed all three of their lives.

AMERICAN SONS: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN is an incredible true story told by the people who lived it — a narrative of survival against impossible odds, a case study on the indomitability of the human spirit, and a testament to the transformative power of forgiveness.

The 40th anniversary edition of AMERICAN SONS includes new and expanded content, including numerous articles written by Christopher Boyce for the Minneapolis Star Tribune during the late ’80s and early ’90s that shed stark light on life behind prison walls.

Over one thousand years ago, an alien fleet locked the Antyran star system inside a weird space distortion. Now it is time to find their secrets.

On a beautiful summer morning some 1,250 years before the start of our story, the fleet of an advanced civilization arrived on the Antyran home planet. It wasn’t a pleasant encounter – at least not for the Antyrans, because the aliens burned their ice cities to the ground and locked the whole star system inside a space distortion that held them captive ever since, hiding the stars.
After such an awesome display of destruction, they went back to where they came, but not before investing an Antyran, called Baila I, as the ruler of the world.
Despite the constant barriers imposed by the long string of Bailas, and the ever-hotter wall of fire created by the light of the star trapped in the distortion field — which reminded them of their pledge of obedience to the sky masters — the Antyrans progressed. After they developed their first fusion engines, they built colonies on the other two planets inside the distortion.
And then, on another beautiful day, the discovery of a few fragments from an ancient spaceship buried in a ravine on one of the recently colonized worlds will open up the chest of madness.

Gillabrian, or Gill, as friends use to call him, is an Antyran archaeologist. After stumbling upon the terrible secrets of the alien visitors, he finds himself in the unenviable position of being hunted on all the Antyran worlds, and not only there.
The path laid before Gill forces him to change, to discover that he has the strength to overcome his fears and make the right choices even against overwhelming odds. But beyond that, he is compelled to explore the meaning of being alive, to glimpse the fine line between life and death, and find how technology would eventually blur their boundary.
Being thrown in the river of madness, he will reach the point where any choice is a bad choice, when defeating a foe could open the path for an even greater evil, when the light at the end of the tunnel is the hideous grin of a technological singularity bent on assimilating everything, its tentacles as long as the Universe.
Will our hero prevail and find a way to keep the secrets of the Sigian Bracelet?